My site could use 500-700 megs. I can streamline that and I plan too... In terms of server specs we use ASP (for a DSN-less database connection for our reviews section....reviews are in an access database and run fine with current hits). Our UBB/forum uses Perl / CGI. Our news is CGI generated as well. Those are the main areas of concern. The killer though is bandwidth. With where I am hosted now I am facing close to $1000 US a month or I'll be shutdown. I have been pricing alternatives but as I am sure you are aware it's still not cheap. Most hosting packages cover anywhe from 20-50gb of transfers a month. Well try a site that needs about 175gb - and this is at current levels with the our (LEGAL) mp3 section deleted!!! It was even wayyyyyy above that with that section online....but that section is not going to stay online...can't be done.

From yesterday afternoon here are some of the live stats:
"The transfer rates your site was showing was an average of about 75k BYTES per second or 550k BITS per second. At 3:30 when I was monitoring it you were averaging about 110k BYTES. Your spikes were running in the 500k BYTES range but sometimes were over 1.2 Megabytes....and remember, all this is without the downloads (mp3/video)."


Someone here must know the best and most afforable solution out there?!?!

Please e-mail me with suggestions.

At that data transfer rate what you need is a dedicated server, not a shared hosting solution.

Windows dedicated is more expensive -- have you thought of trying to convert the site to run on Linux with PHP and MySQL instead of ASP with Access? You would probably see better performance as well as lower costs.

$1000 a month (is that Can$ or US$) would get you a real nice dedicated server! For Linux you could spend US$300 a month and get something very nice, and pay up to $2 a Gb for your extra data transfer.

Windows, you are probably looking at $350 a month as you'd need more memory I think.

The data transfer is likely what would be expensive. I'd suggest check around various datacentres: check who provides their connectivity, how reliable it is and how well it performs, how much redundancy they have. Then check the price. Don't be trapped into signing up with someone just because their data transfer price is low -- if it's poor performance and unreliable it's a waste of $$.

For Windows, pick a datacentre that really knows Windows and can help you if you get stuck (plus is willing to!). A single site server is not that difficult to manage but there are gotchas.

It's fun!

Convert your UBB over to vBulletin, and make sure you're using mod_gzip. That alone will save you a bunch of bandwidth, depending on how active your forums are.

Mickey

sent ya an email :)

Originally posted by DelusionalMi
sent ya an email :)

What is the point of this post? This is not the ad forum.

Peter